Meditation For A Busy Mind

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Emily Fletcher sang and danced on Broadway. She was under lots of pressure to perform three different roles as an understudy and the anxiety was getting to her. She was getting strung out and hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in 18 months. She had met someone who introduced her to meditation, and after a single session, cured herself of insomnia.

Emily was in. She developed a practice and went to India to complete her training. She came back and started teaching thousands of people the technique that helped her so much. She spends 20 minutes twice a day and is calm, collected and happy. Her general framework is this:

Emily’s Steps to Relaxation

Balance your breath

Come to your senses

Dip your toe into silence

Use the “M Word” – a mellow chant to slow down

End with gratitude

When we get rid of stress in our bodies, we get time back. We get our sanity back. Using meditation to drive that change is a powerful tool and we don’t need to change anything else about us to get there.

Interview Summary:

Her life was filled with a constant state of anxiety – getting dragged on stage

This caused her to go grey at age 26 and experience 18 months of insomnia

First full night of sleep was after her first meditation class

Vishkam Karma Yoga – her lineage is not a monastic practice

She left Broadway, went to India and started a 3-year training to teach this

Her priorities shifted and she committed to teaching this to people

She’s taught 3500 people how to meditate now

She grew up Southern Baptist and believes Religion is like an operating system and Meditation is like defragging your computer

Teaching actors meditation helped them make leaps in their performance

Her company, Ziva Meditation, specializes in meditation for better performance

She meditates for a minimum of 20 min 2x/day

Meditating makes your sex better by reducing stress

Too much cortisol makes women incapable of orgasm

Men can’t get erections with too much adrenaline

If you’re going to meditate, find a teacher your trust

You get time back when you get rid of the stress in your body

It may feel selfish but it’s actually a gift of a better you to your loved ones

Interview Notes From The Show:

Dr. Pedram:

Hey. Welcome back to The Urban Monk. Dr. Pedram Shojai in studio, finally. I’ve been doing so much Skype. If feels good to have a human person in here, in studio with me. My new, really, really great friend, who I got to hang out with at one conference and was like, “Oh, you’re with me,” Emily Fletcher, she is a meditation genius because she can translate meditation into normal speak. Her company’s called Ziva Meditation. We’re going to do some meditation stuff, but we’re mostly here to just have fun and unpack some of the weird spiritual, convoluted, knotted lingo around this stuff and, really, just talk about what’s real. Hi.

Emily:

Hello, friend.

Dr. Pedram:

Hi. Welcome.

Emily:

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. Thanks for being here. You didn’t come from some Ashram lineage. You didn’t come from some thing where it’s like, “Oh, I’ve done this my whole life.” You came from Broadway.

Emily:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

Yeah, 10 years of it.

Dr. Pedram:

10 years of it? What were you doing on Broadway?

Emily:

I did The Producers, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 42nd Street. You name it, I did it.

One time, in Moscow. I was doing a show in Moscow, and I had this entrance, and it was a big lead-up. Imagine 17 men, building, building, changing keys, and then I’m the first woman out, just in this beautiful gown, and I come out, and then wham!

Dr. Pedram:

Oh, yes.

Emily:

I tripped over a doorway and just ate it. It was really, really embarrassing.

Dr. Pedram:

Yes.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Well, you have to, right? If you’ve run enough miles, you’re going to fall.

Emily:

That’s right.

Dr. Pedram:

That’s it.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You’re on Broadway, and it’s stressful. Broadway’s not easy.

Emily:

It’s 8 shows a week, 6 days a week. You have Mondays off, but-

Dr. Pedram:

8 shows a day, 6 days a- ?

Emily:

8 shows a week. You do a show every day, and then 2 on Saturday, 2 on Wednesday.

Dr. Pedram:

Got it.

Emily:

You have Monday off, and then you’re back at it on Tuesday, so it’s not a joke. It’s fun, but it’s hard work.

Dr. Pedram:

Wow. So you’re on the road mostly, or … ?

Emily:

I did do a few tours. I did a show in Moscow, China, Japan, and I did 3 national tours, in addition to the shows I did on Broadway in New York. When you’re touring, you travel on your 1 day off, because that’s relaxing.

Dr. Pedram:

Because that’s relaxing.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Okay, so at what point do you go, “Hey, wait a minute. I need to probably do something to bring it down”?

Emily:

It was all sunshine and roses. It was great, and then my last Broadway show was A Chorus Line, and I was understudying 3 of the lead roles, which means you show up to the theater and you have no idea who you’re going on for. Sometimes I would start the show as one character. Halfway through, they switch me to a different one, which, hi, I’m 5’9” with red hair. I’m not hiding on stage. The audience was very confused. Sometimes I would just be chilling in my dressing room, doing my taxes, and someone would say, “Emily Fletcher, we need you on stage,” and I would start panicking. I would grab all 3 costumes, run down 7 flights of stairs, someone would throw me in a costume and, I’m not kidding, sometimes I would be on stage before I knew which character I was playing. I’d be like, “Oh, there’s no Val,” and into a 6-page song, which is really just terrifying.

Dr. Pedram:

Whoa.

Emily:

Some people are good at it. I am not one of them. I was basically living my life in this constant state of anxiety, and even if I wasn’t on, I was terrified that I was going to be thrown on.

Dr. Pedram:

Because at any given moment you could be doing your taxes and then be on.

Emily:

Exactly, like within 30 seconds.

Dr. Pedram:

Wow.

Emily:

You have to constantly be ready. 2 of the roles I was very good at. One of them I was awful at, just really, really bad at, and that was the one I always went on for. It’s embarrassing to be on a stage with 3,000 people looking at you in a leotard and sucking at your job and knowing that you’re sucking, and then the more stressed you get, the worse your performance is, and then the worse my performance was, the worse my sleep was. It just became this downward spiral, where I started having insomnia for about 18 months. I started going grey at 26 years old, which is not great when you’re an actress. I started getting sick, started getting injured. I was like, “Wait a minute. Why am I living my dream and miserable?”

Thankfully, there was a woman sitting next to me in the dressing room. She was understudying 5 of the lead roles, which to this day I don’t know how she did it, but she was crushing it. Every song this woman sang was a celebration, and every dance she did was a celebration. Finally, I was like, “Lady, what do you know that I don’t know?”

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. Come on. Out with it.

Emily:

Yeah, give it to me. She’s like, “I meditate.” I was like, “Come on.”

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

This was 10 years ago, so there wasn’t the neuroscience then that there is now. It wasn’t as popular then as it is now. I didn’t really believe her, so I just kept sucking at my job and going grey and having insomnia. Finally, it got so bad I didn’t even feel like myself anymore. I decided, “Well, what do I have to lose?”

Dr. Pedram:

Fine, fine, help me.

Emily:

Give me bliss and fulfillment. I looked at this intro to meditation talk, liked what I heard, signed up for this 4-day course, and the first day of the first class I was meditating. I had no idea what that meant, but I was in a different state of consciousness that I had ever been in before, and I liked it. That night I slept through the night for the first time in 18 months, and I have every night since, and that was 10 years ago.

Dr. Pedram:

That’ll do it.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

That’ll do it.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

What kind of meditation? Was it a specific lineage? I’m a geek for this kind of stuff, so I’m just curious.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

What works for redheads?

Emily:

The Sanskrit word is Nishkam Karma Yoga, which basically means union attained by action hardly taken, which I like to call “the lazy man’s meditation,” but it is the Shankaracharya lineage. It’s a [inaudible 00:05:53] lineage. What’s unique about it was that it was actually designed for people with busy minds and busy lives, so it’s actually not a monastic practice. It’s not a derivative of something that was made for monks, even though it’s 6,000 years old. It was actually designed for people with busy minds and busy lives. I think that that’s why I took to it so quickly, and I’ve taught like 3,500 people to meditate now. People, within hours, within days, they start to notice shifts in themselves, and it’s not the kind of thing where you have to stop drinking Jack Daniels or you have to stop having sex or you have to move to a cave. It’s like you can just do it at your office, in a conference room, or on a plane, or on a bus.

Dr. Pedram:

Does it look weird? Are you- ?

Emily:

It just looks kind of like this.

Dr. Pedram:

Like you’re napping?

Emily:

Yeah. It looks like you’re taking a little snooze on the train.

Dr. Pedram:

But what’s happening inside?

Emily:

Infinite bliss and fulfillment. What’s happening inside-

Dr. Pedram:

Results not always guaranteed.

Emily:

Well … When I say bliss, I think it’s important to note that I don’t actually mean happiness. When I say bliss, I mean the piece of you that knows that it’s all okay. It’s possible to experience bliss even when you’re sad, even when you’re angry, even when you’re tired. There’s still a little piece of you that knows that everything’s going to be okay. What I find is that the more you meditate, the bigger this background of bliss becomes, which actually paradoxically frees you up to feel the entire spectrum of emotions.

When you’re terrified that you’re going to be overwhelmed with this tsunami of feeling, it’s very easy to be like, “Not now. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.” But once your body knows that it has a repeatable, sustainable means by which to access fulfillment and bliss in the only place that it resides, which is inside of you, then you actually are much safer to feel the entire spectrum of whatever’s going on for you in that moment, and then move through to the new now.

Dr. Pedram:

When you experience it the first time, was it just like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Holy crap, what is this,” or, “Oh, this is interesting”?

Emily:

It wasn’t that moment. I’ve had those moments. In my 10-year career of meditating, I’ve had some shifts and some big leaps, but it wasn’t the first day, like, “Ah, I’m enlightened.”

Dr. Pedram:

The Red Sea just parted.

Emily:

No. For most people, it’s like a gently shedding of skin. With each meditation, you’re shedding layers of stress. You’re coming back to more and more you, more and more your true nature, which I really believe is 24-hour-a-day bliss. My first day, it was, “This is different. This isn’t waking. It isn’t sleeping, and it isn’t dreaming. It’s something different, and I like it,” but then the crazy thing for me was that, that night, I really, truly slept through the night for the first time in 18 months, and then it cured my insomnia. It was just gone. If that’s the only thing that meditation had done for me, it would have been worth it.

Dr. Pedram:

Are you kidding? Slam dunk.

Emily:

Yeah. But then it was like I started getting better at my job. I stopped going grey. I’m 37 years old now. I have like 2 grey hairs. I was legitimately going grey a decade ago. I used to get sick 4 or 5 times a year, and then I went 8 and a half years without getting sick. I started getting better at my job, and my relationships got better. It was like, “Why does everybody not do this?” I left Broadway, went to India, and I started a 3-year training process to teach this.

Dr. Pedram:

Wow. Quick question about the Broadway part. Even the sucky role?

Emily:

Did I get better at that?

Dr. Pedram:

Did you get better at the sucky role?

Emily:

To be honest, I don’t have a data point on that because I learned meditation … I had 4 days off between Chorus Line Broadway and then Chorus Line tour. On the tour, I originated the role that I was very good at. I played Sheila on the first national tour. In addition to meditation, my job actually did get better. Chorus Line Broadway was the worst job I’ve ever had, and then Chorus Line tour was the best job I’ve ever had, until this one. I don’t think that was just a circumstantial change. I think it was both internal and external.

Dr. Pedram:

Sure. Well, the universe just pivoted for you, too. Okay. India, that’s an interesting place. What was that? Were you just like, “Hey. This has changed my life. I need to go drink from the fountain”? Did something change? You followed a boy? What happened?

Emily:

Yeah. It changed my life. I wanted to drink from the fountain. I really was like, “I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t do this thing.” The first time I went to India, it was just I wanted to learn more. I went on a personal retreat for myself, but when I got there, that’s when I decided I definitely wanted to teach it, but I figured, “You know what? I’ll do it later, like when I’m not acting anymore, when I’m not dancing anymore,” but life very quickly showed me where my talents were needed.

Dr. Pedram:

It just kept you there?

Emily:

No, I didn’t stay there, but I sort of arrogantly thought that I would be able to act and teach meditation and teach acting. My agents would be like, “Hey. Could we have head shots and resumes,” and it would take me 3 months to get them to them. Meanwhile, I was teaching hundreds of people to meditate. It became clear where my priorities were, so I decided to go all in with Ziva.

Dr. Pedram:

Great, great. You’re helping so many people.

Emily:

It feels really good.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. It’s so weird, right? People are like, “I don’t want to do this thing. It’s weird. I’m Christian, or I’m this, or I’m that.” People just have so many layers of defense around this thing that they’re afraid of, right?

Emily:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Pedram:

You didn’t come from some sort of woo-woo, hippy thing.

Emily:

No, I grew up Southern Baptist, actually. What I like to say about meditation is that it’s more of a hardware upgrade versus a software upgrade. I would even call religions … They’re a belief system, so it’s like an operating system. It’s a way that you operate in your life, in your waking state. Whereas meditation, to me, is more like defragging the computer. It’s like upleveling your actual hard drive so that you can run whatever software that you have. I think if you’re a Christian, it’s going to make you a better Christian. I think if you’re a Jew, it’s going to make you a better Jew. I think if you’re atheist, we’re probably going to talk in about 3 months, just because once you start meditating, you start noticing all of this serendipity and synchronicity, and you start to see that there’s something at play here. What people call that thing, I have no real interest in. I just have interest in the fact that they experience it, because it’s-

Dr. Pedram:

The commonality of experience is constantly there, like, “Hey. Yeah, this thing that happened … ” Oh, yeah, I had a similar thing. It’s not like there’s some database that everyone looks at and says, “Oh, let me go draw upon my meditation experience to share with my buddies. It happens.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You working on it?

Emily:

I’m not, but I’m sure someone is.

Dr. Pedram:

Dave Asprey should.

Emily:

All the data monitoring devices, we’ll have that data soon.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, totally, totally. It’s funny, because we had a couple of gentlemen last round on the show, both normal people, like a PhD in chemistry and a medical doctor, near-death experiences. The amount of data that comes through of people that are like, “Yeah. I was getting a surgery, and I was looking down at my body and, oh shit, there it was, and then I went through this thing,” the stories are very similar, to the point where it’s creepy. How are these people … Are they all huddled up and collaborating, or is there some sort of … corroborating is the word I was looking for … or is there some thing that they’re now witnessing?

Now, you witnessed this thing, and you couldn’t help but jump in and say, “Yo, I’ve got to teach this.”

Emily:

Exactly.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. What does that look like? Do you go to the people that were like you and say, “Hey, listen. I know you’re stressed out, and I’ve got a solution for you”? Who do you go to to teach meditation, or do they come to you?

Emily:

Because I had been on Broadway for so long, and because I had actually become an acting teacher, I had a pretty big following of acting students, so I started there. I started teaching my acting students. Obviously I’m bias, but I have never seen anything that improves an acting … really, just performance in general, the meditation. These people would take such leaps in their work. They would become so much less self-conscious, so much more creative, so much more present, which is everything that every acting teacher teaches, but this was happening spontaneously and effortlessly for them. Then once one actor’s work would get so better, everyone else in class was like, “What happened?”

Dr. Pedram:

Competitive advantage.

Emily:

Yes. It’s totally a competitive advantage. I started there, and I had a bunch of Broadway friends and celebrity friends that I had just been friends with through the years. You teach enough celebrities to meditate, they tweet about it, and then it’s on. Thankfully, I got invited to speak at Harvard Business School, which is where I met Dave Asprey, and he invited me on his podcast, to speak at his conference, and then I got invited to speak at Google. You get a few of those under your belt, and I was fortunate enough to do that pretty early, and then it starts to snowball.

It was a big day for me, the day that I had a course with no actors in it. I was like, “Oh.”

Dr. Pedram:

Normal people.

Emily:

Yeah. It’s not just my acting students anymore. Now it’s all types of people. Really, at Ziva, what we specialize in is meditation for better performance, so I tend to attract high achievers, high performers, people that aren’t necessarily dealing with some horrible, suffering thing. Some people come when they’re at rock bottom, but often times it’s people that just want that competitive advantage, people that want to feel better, that want to enjoy their lives more.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, and that’s pretty much all of us, but we might not know it.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Some people don’t realize that they’re not upping their game enough to be able to work through life’s stuff. Others are just like, “Listen. I got a sales job, and the clearer I am, the more money shows up in my bank account,” or, “I run a company, and I just can’t keep my life together and run my company because I’m scattered.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

When you realize that you are the road block in your own life, then, man, anything’s an option. I’ve had a lot of billionaires, who are very normal people, come to me and say, “Hey. Will you please teach me this,” and it’s hard. It’s hard not to see it when you get in your own way, but people who don’t know that they’re in their own way, that’s a different subclass. Once you recognize it, then you go chasing after it.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

Help me.

Emily:

Yeah, like running downhill towards enlightenment. What I don’t understand is people who are like, “Well, I don’t have time to meditate, or I’m too busy to meditate.” I’m like, “This is your brain that we’re talking about. This thing is responsible for producing every single cell in your body, for every single decision that you make. Every dollar that you earn, every orgasm that you have, every sentence that you speak is coming from here. To not invest the time to maintain this machine is mind-boggling to me. I really don’t get it.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, but most of us don’t.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

I just need to-

Emily:

We’ll take our computer to the shop, but not our brains.

Dr. Pedram:

Not our brain. Not our brain. You couldn’t really see it before. There wasn’t brain imaging. There wasn’t this stuff. There were these people talking about it, but the hippies made it a little weird. You know what I’m saying? It got really convoluted with cultural stuff.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You can’t just meditate. You’ve got to dress like this guy, and you’ve got to wear patchouli.

Emily:

You’ve got to wear some incense.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. It became this cultural identity that has nothing, nothing, to do with meditation. How long? How long do you spend a day? What’s your minimum recommendation?

Emily:

For me, personally, if I’m not teaching, I’ll do 20 minutes twice a day. I’ll do it in the morning before breakfast, and I’ll do it some point before my evening meal. When I’m teaching, sometimes it’ll be 4 or 5 times a day, if I have lots of classes, but minimum for me is 20 minutes twice a day. If I’m flying, I’ll do more which, honestly, the jet lag transformation happens when you meditate. I’ll do take off and landing, in addition to my other sessions, and it’s really remarkable, that you can land somewhere and actually feel fresh.

Dr. Pedram:

Plus, it’s like what are you going to do? Sit there and watch another dumb movie Hollywood threw at you, or do something good for yourself?

Emily:

Yes, exactly.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. I do not let that downtime become wasted time.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

Period. Once you learn how to meditate, you always have a place to go to draw from infinity.

Emily:

Yeah. That’s a beautiful phrase, draw from infinity. Maybe that could be your 4th book.

Dr. Pedram:

Thank you. Yeah, totally. The Urban Monk I wanted to name Drinking From Infinity. I think the next book, that’s going to be in the title somewhere, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I just love the idea of being able to stop time and go in. The auspices under which we met is she was guiding a group with JJ Virgin’s thing. I’m in the group, and she comes up, and she just starts doing it. Every single piece of her meditation gestalt was spot on, in my opinion, of the fundamentals that need to be addressed, without all the woo-woo. I was like, “Ah, friend. I like you.” It was using the senses to come in and all that. Let’s talk about the gestalt of it. What are the philosophies behind what you’re teaching?

Emily:

There’s 2 things that I do. What we do, and what I really pride myself on, is making people self-sufficient. When people move through my training, by the time they graduate, they have a practice to take with them for life. They don’t need me anymore. Yeah. They have access to me if they need support, but the idea is that any tool is only as good as if you actually use it, and I can’t be on the plane with you every time you fly. I really like to train people to be self-sufficient.

Now, what I do at corporations or conferences when I’m leading a guided meditation is something different, because people don’t have 10 hours. I can’t train them in 20 minutes that I have on stage. In those instances, I’ll usually start with something called balancing breath, which is really just an alternate nostril pranayama breathing, where you’re closing the right and left nostrils. It helps to balance the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and it slows down the metabolic rate, which is the rate with which the body consumes oxygen.

The way I think about breath work is like pulling the bow back on the bow and arrow so that when the body’s ready to surrender into the meditation, it can. Then, usually, I’ll lead people through something I call “come to your sense”, which is just simply walking through hear what you’re hearing, feel what you’re feeling, see what you’re seeing, taste what you’re tasting, smell what you’re smelling. That allows people to pull the lens of their awareness back and include everything that’s happening inside of the meditation, instead of trying to focus in or be like, “Ugh. There’s a truck outside, or my baby’s crying.” People, I think, get frustrated with the noises. They think of them as distractions, when, actually, I want them to include everything in.

Then we do something I like to call “the M word technique”, which is like dipping your toe into silence, because silence freaks people out sometimes because usually there’s a lifetime of trauma that starts raging up and out. I just dip the toe in for a moment, a little silent practice called “the M word”, and then I love to end with gratitude. An interesting neuroscience study came out a few weeks ago, maybe months at this point, but they said that even if you don’t have anything to be grateful for, even if you can’t think of one thing to give thanks for, just you asking the question is enough to change the chemistry of your brain. I thought that was pretty powerful. What am I grateful for? Then it starts to reprogram your brain to look for everything that’s going right, instead of training your brain to look for problems to solve, which most of us are a little too adept at.

Dr. Pedram:

Let’s talk about the problems to solve piece, because a lot of people in the West feel like they fail at meditation because they’re not stopping their mind.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Like, “Oh, goddammit. I had another thought. I’m such a loser. My dad was right.” It’s just thing compounding neurosis that builds on it. Let’s talk about not needing to do that, maybe.

Emily:

Yes, please. Let’s. Okay, so I don’t know who this dude is. Maybe between the 2 of us we can find him, but there’s one dude going around telling everyone that in order to meditate, you have to clear your mind. It’s probably the person that’s wearing patchouli and incense.

Dr. Pedram:

100%, while he’s outside smoking cigarettes on his breaks, right.

Emily:

Yeah, totally. In my personal experience, and at least in the trainings that I’ve had and the traditions that I’ve studied, your efficacy of meditation has nothing to do with how good you are at giving your brain a command to be silent. Notice I’m not saying that you can’t stop your mind, because it is possible to stop time, it is possible to access other states of consciousness-

Dr. Pedram:

Down the way.

Emily:

Yeah, but what is challenging, certainly for a beginner, is to sit down and be like, “Okay, brain. Stop thinking.” Most people are like, “I sure would like a snack. I love snacks. Oh, wait. That’s a thought. Oh, no. Now I’m thinking. Oh, no. I’m thinking about how I’m thinking. Oh, I’m the worst meditator in the world, and I quit.”

Dr. Pedram:

I wonder if they’re watching me.

Emily:

And then we feel like a failure, to your point, and then that’s the beginning and the end of most people’s meditation career. I’m on a bit of a mission to really reframe this for people. I think the thing that is important to take away is that the mind thinks involuntarily, just like the heart beats involuntarily. Let’s all imagine how ridiculous it would be to sit down and be like, “Okay, heart. Stop beating,” or, “Okay, nails. Stop growing.” That’s not up to us. We see that as ridiculous, and yet this is the criteria by which most people are judging their meditations.

What I give people a lot of permission to do is just know that you’re going to have thoughts. You’re absolutely going to have thoughts when you meditate. Some of them you’re going to enjoy. Some of them you’re not. What I like to do is think about it like a party. All my thoughts are my party guests, and then whatever meditation technique you’re using, that becomes your guest of honor. If you’re using the breath, that’s your guest of honor. If you’re using a mantra, like we do at Ziva, that’s your guest of honor. But all of the other guests are allowed to be there.

Dr. Pedram:

I like that. I like that a lot.

Emily:

Good.

Dr. Pedram:

You know what’s funny? I think back on this whole “I need to silence my mind” thing, and I think a lot of it is this distillation process, where it’s like, “Okay. I read all these things from these meditation people, and these guys talked about this state of nirvana, where everything disappeared, and I disappeared, and there were no thoughts, and this, that, and the other. Great. Okay, let’s take that. That’s the goal of meditation. Everybody, this is meditation.” It’s just like, “Yo, dude. That guy spent 30 years sitting on his ass, and he had that for a moment, and it transformed him forever. He didn’t do it coming off the freaking tax account meeting”

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

It’s unfair to hold yourself to that. Even that, that’s a trap. You look at all the classic Buddha’s text, it’s not like, “Okay. I had this nirvana moment. Now every time I sit down, I want to go back to that nirvana moment because that was bliss. Now I’m suffering, trying to go back there.”

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

Move on.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

The party and the guests, I love that analogy. It’s so easy. There’s sound right now. Oh, my toe itches. I’m such a loser. I can’t believe I can’t meditate. My toe itches.

Emily:

No, you just include it in.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

I think, to your point, because we in the West are very goal-oriented, we’re very achievement-focused, and so we’ve done that with meditation. “Okay. Well, what’s the point? What’s the goal? What’s the fastest way to get there?” What I try to encourage my students to do is don’t try to meditate. Do or do not. There is no try. Yoda had it right. You don’t try to act. You don’t try to sing. You don’t try to date. You don’t try to orgasm. If you think about bliss and nirvana as the orgasm of meditation, you don’t start with that. There has to be a lot of conditions leading up to that orgasm: low light, feeling like you’re not being observed, trust, comfortability, safety, maybe a little bit of dinner. You have to do the foreplay that is meditation. We can’t expect to go right to the goal, which isn’t even really a goal.

Dr. Pedram:

Which is a funny comparison, because a lot of people, in sex, are just like quickest path to O and move on, so watch our show.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

That’s why sex has become really weird, too. It’s about relaxing into it and allowing and all these wonderful things. Listening to this and being a stressed out, busy person in my car, in my home, or wherever I’m listening to this, going, “Okay. Okay. That sounds interesting, but I’m still a little afraid,” how do I toe into meditation, or is there no toe-in, like you jump?

Emily:

I have a little bit of mixed feelings on this because I feel very strongly that meditation is like any other skill, and it takes a little bit of practice and a good teacher, and if you’re willing to invest a bit of time, then it can be ridiculously easy and enjoyable. I feel like meditation is this thing that we feel like, “Oh, well, they taught it that one day in 10th grade, and I was absent that day, and so everyone else knows how to meditate, and I am secretly just going to pretend like I already know how to do it.”

Dr. Pedram:

I’ll just close my eyes.

Emily:

Yeah. I’ll just close my eyes and pretend to look cool, make some fancy fingers on Instagram, but it’s like any other skill. I really believe that it’s worth it to get a bit of instruction. Yes, I know I’m a meditation teacher, so I’m biased. Again, this is your brain that we’re talking about. I think it’s worth the investment. However, I do think that if you want to just dip your toe in the water, I have a bunch of guided visualizations on our YouTube channel. I have a bunch of guided visualizations where I’m walking through those things that I just talked you through, and I think guided visualizations are probably the easiest way for someone to start, just to be like, “Hey. This is 10 minutes that I’m taking for myself, where I’m not making dinner, and I’m not working, and I’m not asleep.”

Dr. Pedram:

I’m going to sit down.

Emily:

Yeah. Just carving out that space, I think, could be step 1. Then if people want to dive deeper, I actually created the world’s first online meditation training, which I’m really proud of. It’s called Ziva Mind, and it’s 8 days. It’s about 25 minutes a day of video training. It’s a matriculation, so each day’s training builds upon the previous day. By the end of that 8 days, you have a practice to take with you for life. You don’t need me anymore. You don’t need an app. You don’t need finger symbols. You just need a chair. Even if you don’t have access to a teacher face to face, then you can learn at zivamind.com.

We’re in an interesting time right now. Technology is advancing, and so there are apps now, and there are online trainings now. Even people that wouldn’t traditionally have access to these teachings now do.

Dr. Pedram:

There’s a lot of debate in the community about how useful some of this is, and how much it distracts from the real work, or whatever it is. To me, personally, I feel like if you’re bringing down stress in a given individual, hallelujah, because they’re about to blow up, and the world’s about to blow up, and they flicked off one less person in traffic today. You made the world a better place. However, from there there’s this path, whether you want to call it ascension or deeper dive, into question of, “Who am I,” and really the essence of of some of the spiritual traditions that are driven by these meditation practices, or come from the meditation practices. There’s always a place to go. Where do you see people going and finding direction, like busy Manhattan people or busy urbanite people who are like, “Yes. I need this for edge”? Do you see them softening and finding a personal path?

Emily:

Yes. My husband asked me a question many years ago when I was really starting Ziva, and he said, “Are you afraid to put candy coating on the medicine?” I thought about it, and I was like, “Absolutely not.” I really got clear, and I was like, “Ya’ll candy coat the medicine all day long,” and I really don’t care why people come to meditation. They could come to it because they want to look hotter. They could come to it because they want to look younger. They can come to it because they want to have better orgasms.

The beautiful thing that I’ve noticed is that it doesn’t matter what selfish, self-serving reason we come to the practice, the by-product is always the same. People always become less stressed. They become more altruistic. They become more generous, because whether you like it or not, your dorsomedial prefrontal cortex starts attaching and lighting up and connecting to your insula, which is your empathy center. The piece of your brain that’s in charge of processing information about people that we perceive as separate starts connecting to the empathy center of your brain when you meditate, so you become less of a dick, whether you like it or not. If you’re stressed, and you just want to make more money, and that’s why you’re meditating, great. Come on.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, yeah. Let’s just keep rewiring.

Emily:

Yeah. Over time, we become more compassionate, more kind. We start to see the unity. We start to see ourselves in side of others, and I’ve had a lot of students make big career shifts, where they’re like, “Hey. Why am I using my talents for this thing when I could actually be really making an impact,” towards whatever they feel to be important at this moment in time?

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, and then they get the clarity to go ahead and do that.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You mentioned something twice that I know my listeners are … their ears perked up, and I can’t let you off the hook here.

Emily:

Uh-oh.

Dr. Pedram:

You said orgasm, better orgasm, better sex.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You’ve experience this through meditation. I think a lot of people in meditation practices have better intimacy. What’s happening there?

Emily:

Okay, so I started talking about meditation and sex because so many of my students came to me and they’re like, “Emily, what is going on? You made some- “

Dr. Pedram:

Shit just changed.

Emily:

Yeah. “You made some jokes about his at your intro talk, but I’m having animalistic, raw experiences.” I’ve never heard the term animalistic in terms of meditation before, and so I started doing more and more research on it, and I realized that there’s actually quite a bit of neuroscience behind this and backing this up. It turns out, when your body’s stressed, you’re basically in a fight-or-flight stress reaction. Your body’s preparing for a predatory attack, so you have very little energy left for procreation or for pleasure. Think about if you were in the middle of a football game and you broke your leg, it would be possible for you to finish that football game and not even notice that you had broken your leg.

That’s what adrenaline and cortisol does to us. It dampens our senses so that we can keep going. If that tiger bites us, it won’t be so debilitating. Guess what sex is? It’s decidedly a 5-sensory experience. If you have so much adrenaline and cortisol in your body, A, your senses are dampened so you’re not hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, feeling as deeply as you could and, just from a chemical standpoint, if women have too much cortisol in their bodies, they’re physically incapable of orgasm. If men have too much adrenaline, they’re physically incapable of erection. This isn’t just like, “Oh, when I’m meditating, my chakras well-aligned with my partner’s chakras.” There’s actually some neuroscience behind it.

Basically, what I found with meditation is that you’re getting rid of stress in your body, and you have so much energy left for the creative, and sex can be a decidedly creative act. That same thing that I was talking about, about the empathy, where the insula and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex connect to each other, that also helps you to see more of yourself inside of your partner and more of your partner inside of you. That, combined with this increase in mirror neural activity … which mirror neurons are why porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Mirror neurons are basically the thing that allows you to watch something and feel like you’re a part of the experience.

This gets heightened when we meditate as well. All of the neural activity increases, but specifically this mirror neuron thing. What I like to think about it is that you become almost like … your lover will think that you are psychic, where you’re almost intuiting what their needs are before they know it, and the more you see them having pleasure, the more pleasure it brings you, and so it becomes this really beautiful, upward, generous spiral, versus a, “Can we just get this over with so we can go back to Netflix?”

Dr. Pedram:

Hurry up.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Hurry up.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

You ready?

Emily:

Let’s do this. I’m ovulating.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. I’m ovulating. You know what? I really need an orgasm right now. It’s been a really long day.

Emily:

Right.

Dr. Pedram:

In the old days, there’d be candle light. There’d be wine. You relax into it. All these rituals around it … and I know people will smoke pot for intimacy. I know people that drink wine for intimacy. Great. What is it doing? It’s relaxing you. Now, could you do that with something that is naturally built in, that just drops you into that spot?

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

There’s a whole branch of meditation. Tantra is a whole branch of this.

Dr. Pedram:

It’s good stuff. It’s good stuff. There are lineages and lineages of this stuff in India, in China, and Tibet. This has been around for thousands of years. We’ve forgotten most of it. Fortunately, the traditions are alive and well still.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah. I love all of this. Now, we talked about this pre-show. There’s a couple groups, the people that are, “Okay. I don’t meditate. Convince me.” How do you approach someone like that with a meditation practice?

Emily:

The main reasons that most people don’t meditate is that they think they’re too busy, they think they’re falling asleep when they’re doing it, or they’re frustrated because they can’t stop their minds from thinking. Those are the big 3 barriers to entry that I hear most of. We’ve talked about the thoughts already. We haven’t really talked about the sleeping, but here’s the cliffnotes answer, is that if you feel like you’re falling into a bit of a sleepy place, it’s possible that you’re falling into a different state of consciousness besides sleep. I really like to give people a long leash and say, “If you’re feeling a little sleepy, just let yourself fall into that.”

Dr. Pedram:

Lean into it.

Emily:

Yeah. If you fall out of the chair, then you’ve fallen asleep, and then you just sit back up. No worries. The busy thing is big, because we think, “Well, I can’t just sit there and waste my time. I’ve got stuff to do.” I really try to reframe this for people, and when people say to me, “Emily, I’m too busy to meditate,” I like to say, “Okay. Well, do you have time to feel like crap?” My other favorite comeback is, “If Oprah has time to meditate, then you have time to meditate.”

Dr. Pedram:

Totally.

Emily:

It’s really a question of what are we prioritizing, and do you have the training so that you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time? Because if you don’t know what you’re doing, then I would say it’s kind of a waste of time.

Dr. Pedram:

I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck, is like, “I looked up some thing on the internet, and so I tried meditating. It didn’t work.” It’s like, “What lineage was it?” What is it? There’s tried-and-true ways to do these things, and there’s a lot of bullshit out there.

Emily:

Yeah. There really is. That’s another thing I would say. If you’re going to do it, then find a teacher that you respect, that you trust. It can be a very intimate relationship, so you want that … I think the best way to learn is face to face from a teacher, for sure, but if you don’t have that, then there’s Ziva Mind, or there’s online. There’s Headspace. There’s apps out there that you can at least dip your toe into the water.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

I think the main thing to say to people that don’t meditate is it’s reframing that, “Hey. Once you get rid of the stress in your body, you’re actually giving yourself time back, because your brain is going to function so much more efficiently.” Stress makes you stupid. Quite simply, stress is costing you something, because when you’re stressed, your body starts preparing for an imaginary tiger attack. That’s why you don’t have your full faculties available to you when you’re writing, when you’re doing your work. Your to-do list that used to take you 5 to 6 hours might start to take you 3 or 4. You used to need 8 or 9 hours of sleep. You might start to need 6 or 7 because your sleep becomes more efficient. Once people understand that, or understand the neuroscience behind it, then the return on investment becomes a no-brainer.

Dr. Pedram:

That’s the hard part, right? People don’t save because they feel like, “Today, I’ve got to get through today. I’ve got to get through today.” That’s cortisol talking. Actually, when you said that, this visual came. You know those guys that train by running with a parachute behind them? Imagine yourself running with a parachute behind you, and on the parachute it just says, “Stupid.”

Emily:

Or, “Stressed.”

Dr. Pedram:

Exactly. That’s what stress does. It’s just, “Ugh.”

Emily:

It’s dragging you.

Dr. Pedram:

It sucks. It sucks, and most people live that way, and because everyone else lives that way, I feel like I would be really kind of weird to slow down and close my eyes when everyone else is panicking all around me. It feels self-indulgent, and it feels lazy.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

That’s the insanity of our culture, not of us as an individual, if we could do something about it.

Emily:

I think the selfish point is big, because it feels selfish. It does, but I would argue that meditation is the least selfish thing that you could do, because nobody wants a stressed out version of you. Your kids don’t want stressed mom. Your husband doesn’t want stressed wife. They want you happy, so it’s actually a gift. You’re giving everyone around you a gift when you do it.

I think, to elaborate on your point, people are afraid because they don’t know who they’re going to be without their stress. Most of us are so used to being motivated and driven by that adrenaline and cortisol and competition and fear that we’re afraid that once that goes away that we’re just going to be little bliss bunnies and wallowing around on the couch being like, “I’ve got everything I need right here. Why would I ever go outside?” But it’s actually the opposite. You afford yourself the luxury of being able to move towards the positive, versus away from the negative, and that is a much more sustainable and enjoyable way to live your live.

Dr. Pedram:

One of the things that I’ve noticed, that I’ve had the privilege of seeing, just in teaching Shigong and the things that I do, and you have meditation as your tool for this, is I’ve been around a lot of people in my life that it occurred to me that they do not know the last time they were actually deeply relaxed. There’s something very powerful in the moment where someone actually allows themselves to deeply relax for the first time in maybe 30 years. Shit goes crazy. You cannot go back to being the same lunatic ever again, and if you do, you know you’re being a lunatic now. It’s no longer in your operating system to say, “Okay. That’s normal.” Meditation, in my experience, has been the quickest entry point into that deep relaxation, where you just go, “I’m home.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

That homecoming, you can’t deny it. It’s like that out-of-body experience and all that. It’s like, “Okay. This is an experience. I’ve had it. It’s here with me forever.”

Emily:

Yeah. I feel more relaxed just you asking me that question.

Dr. Pedram:

Right?

Emily:

Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, because you’ve been there, because you’ve elicited that state in yourself through your practice, and anyone who’s been there can be like, “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” We don’t. We don’t give ourselves permission. I’ve got shit to do. I’ve always got shit to do.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

It’s never going to stop.

Emily:

You know what’s interesting, though? Is that I never hear busy people say that they’re busy. If you’re telling yourself a story of how busy you are, just maybe call yourself on your story a little bit and just say, “You know what? Maybe I like feeling this important, because of this pile of things that I have to do,” but if you really look at the high achievers, the people that are really changing the world, like the Oprah Winfreys and the Steven Spielbergs, I bet they don’t wake up and be like, “Ugh, I’m so busy.”

Dr. Pedram:

“Oh, today’s so stressful.”

Emily:

They just execute.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, yeah. It’s funny. In meditation, I found something. I was a good student in school, once I decided to be a good student, but it was just a decision away. It’s like you become a meditator when you decide you’re going to meditate, not when you try things, like Yoda would say. I used to pretend to be busy because my dad would come in and be like, “Hey. What are you doing? Are you doing homework?” I’d be like, “I finished my homework.” He was like, “Well, do some more homework. Do some other shit.” I was like, “What?”

Emily:

Why?

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, because he was an overachiever immigrant like, “We came over here. I did all this for you to succeed.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Okay, fine. Straight As. One time in meditation, it occurred to me that I had spent 15 years of my life pretending to be busy for a father who’s not even watching, because I needed to uphold that, and how much energy and time and life force went into perpetuating this façade for somebody else.

Emily:

Wow.

Dr. Pedram:

It happened in a deep, relaxed state, where you’re like … and those are the types of things that happen in meditation. They’re absolute hacks into the operating system. You find the virus, and you’re like, “Oh.”

Emily:

Delete.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

That’s huge, Pedram. Thank you for sharing that because I bet you’re not alone. I bet there’s lot of people who are pretending to be busy to make their parents happy, and that’s a decision they made 15 years ago and haven’t reexamined it.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah, yeah. It’s just like, “Okay. I realize that if I look busy, they get off my back.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Right?

Emily:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Pedram:

That’s actually why I got straight As all through school. It was like, “Hey. You know what? If I get straight As, they’ll shut the fuck up. This is great.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

I’m your star A student.

Emily:

Yeah, and now I can go chill.

Dr. Pedram:

Now I can go chill or play basketball, or whatever. I just beat them at their own game, but then I realized that the consequence to that was this neurosis that I had to find in meditation and was like, “Oh, wow. That’s not healthy,” and we all have that. We all have that.

Emily:

Yeah.

Dr. Pedram:

Trust me. I’m not any crazier than you.

Emily:

Maybe a little.

Dr. Pedram:

Maybe a little. Maybe a little. Actually, a lot. Yeah.

Emily:

The best kind of crazy.

Dr. Pedram:

The best kind of crazy. The kind that acknowledges and leans into it.

Emily:

Yes.

Dr. Pedram:

Yeah.

Emily:

Yeah, let your freak flag fly.

Dr. Pedram:

That’s it. That’s it. I love what you’re doing. I love everything about your message and the way you’ve packaged it and the way you are just helping people authentically just do what they do.

Emily:

Thank you.

Dr. Pedram:

Ziva Meditation, check it out.

Emily:

Yep.

Dr. Pedram:

Check it out. I think it’s great. Listen, I’m a meditation teacher. I’m endorsing someone as a meditation teacher. This means something. There’s no competitive bullshit here. If this can help you, have her help you. That’s the point. You’ve helped thousands, and I love the fact that you have.

Emily:

Thank you. I really appreciate that. Coming from you, it’s high praise, and thank you for the work that you’re doing and for inviting me to be here.